A comparison of the 1974 and 1980 electoral rolls
revealed that 60% of those who were enrolled to vote in 1974
were no longer in Darwin in 1980. (Milliken).

Subjective personal observation leads the writer to
believe that the 40% of voters who were in Darwin in both
1974 and 1980 contained a high percentage of people who were
already long term residents in 1974; and that the 60% who
left comprised a high percentage of people who were less
committed (cyclone or not) to remain in Darwin.

If this observation is well founded, then it can be said
that there was in 1980 a significant "core" group of "old
timers" who were committed to the place. Those people, and
their families, are still strongly represented in Darwin in
1998, and their contribution to the "Darwin ethos" is a
powerful one.

Again subjectively, the writer has observed that Darwin
residents who lived in the city before Tracy, or who had
strong and long term family connections with the place, are
in now regarded as being "true Darwinites", while those who
arrived later remain "transients" whose commitment to the
place is untested. Tracy was in this sense a social
watershed.

Before Tracy Darwin was a town dominated by public
servants who were responsible to masters in Canberra. Few of
them stayed in the place longer than the two or three years
needed to get onto a fast track in the Commonwealth
bureaucracy, and even in the private sector Darwin was
regarded as a place for short term postings. For the
majority, life in Darwin had a two year horizon.

To the old timers, these people were "long soxers" -
people who weren't staying, and weren't responsive to
Darwin's special qualities. They were blamed for everything
that was wrong with Darwin, and for all the failures of the
Northern Territory to achieve its mythological destiny of
development of its supposedly boundless resources. Tiger
Brennan, sometime miner, full time character, and Darwin's
Mayor when Tracy struck, called them "those blinking bods
from Canberra."

There was a form of local government, a Legislative
Council with no real power and thus an excellent forum for
verbal extravaganzas. Nothing was more extravagant and
colourful than the bombast of Tiger Brennan and other
Councillors who won popular adulation through the virulence
of their attacks on Canberra and their clamour for local
control of the Territory.

Brennan and his colleagues never thought that they would
ever have to administer the self government, much less the
statehood, which they argued was the right of all
Territorians. Thus they were astonished in late 1975 when a
tired and emotional Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser arrived to
campaign for the Territory's one Federal seat - thought
likely to be vital in the contest following the Whitlam
dismissal.

Fraser thought that a promise of statehood in five years
would be a certain vote winner in the Territory, and the
promise was publicly made without local consultation. Fraser
won, and there was more local surprise, and not a little
dismay, when his government announced a timetable for self
government as a transitional measure toward full
statehood.

The election promise of eventual statehood might easily
have been ignored, and few Territorians would have reminded
Fraser of it, such was the lack of enthusiasm for local
control once it became a real prospect rather than a mere
debating ploy. However, this was the era of Fraser's "razor
gang", and an at least superficial determination to cut
direct Commonwealth expenditure.

One of the largest single line items in Commonwealth
budgets had been the huge expenditure in the Northern
Territory - a large figure at the best of times, but now
swollen by enormous commitments to Darwin's reconstruction
post Tracy. Fraser reasoned that the Commonwealth's accounts
would appear far less profligate if this expenditure on the
Territory could be shown as though it were in the nature of
a grant to the States.

Hence the seemingly strange situation, as the self
government timetable advanced, of a Commonwealth keen, even
anxious, that the Territory should have self government, and
an embryonic Territory government cautious, even reluctant,
to accept the transition. It was a situation which the first
Territory Chief Minister Paul Everingham and his advisers
were able to skilfully exploit to win an extraordinarily
generous financial agreement from Canberra to underwrite
fiscal nirvana in the Territory for the first five years
after self government.

Darwin had changed rapidly in the first three years after
Tracy, but after self government in 1978 change was
consolidated and accelerated. No longer was it possible to
put the blame on Canberra for everything that went wrong
(although attempts are still fashionable).

Tracy was thus the catalyst for "normalisation" of
Darwin, and the Territory.